In this video, we will explain to you how to modify the general booking settings.
Transcript
Hello again! In this video, I'm going to show you how to set your bookings' general settings within TourCMS. So first of all, we want to head to Configuration, System and Setup, and then to the Bookings General Settings page.
As you can see, there is a lot you can set up, so we'll run quickly through all these options you have here.
New Bookings
First of all, on the New Bookings, you can choose how far ahead a customer can book. This can be changed between 6 and 42 months in the future. You can assign newly created bookings directly to staff if you want, or just leave them unassigned if you want to assign them later. Bookings in TourCMS can have three statuses: Quotation, Provisional, and Confirmed. So you can choose if a staff-entered booking should be entered as confirmed, as provisional, or as a quotation by default. And you can do the same setting for the bookings made via the booking agent engine or API.
You can change the component order for new bookings (default: start date, end date, sales quantity). If you also do hotel tours, you might want to do this in order to have the hotel first in the listing.
You can choose if the tour name is displayed, which is the default, or if the long tour name is displayed, which you entered in the tour description. You can also choose which name you want to have for your bookings, if it is the regular or the long tour name as chosen in the previous step, or the internal tour name you assigned to the tour. And you can choose if it's "last or edit" or "first or edit," and what text to put if you book multiple tours within one booking.
Booking Expiry and Archiving
Booking Expiry Archiving: Well, you can choose when a booking should be archived and in which cases. So you can check if you want the booking to expire or not. If you have not received the payments for this booking, you can choose when the quotations will expire. This means everything is possible between 1 and 1000 days, so a lot to choose from actually. You can also expire provisional bookings after a certain number of days (here the default setting would be 60). And you can archive confirmed bookings, which is a very helpful safety feature to avoid changes in already confirmed bookings, which might be accidental or on purpose.
Deposit and Balance Payments
You can choose how many days before the booking start date the full balance is due (same thing, between 1 and 1000). You can change the tax for the balance overdue and for the fully paid balance. You can also edit payment classification types, form a separate list with all the payments you accept, and you can do the configuration for upfront deposits within the channel manager, which we will see in a separate video.
Two-Step Deposit: Normal workflow on TourCMS for bookings is "no payment deposit received" and "full balance received." With this tick, you can enter a second deposit step if this is required. For cancelled bookings, you can choose if you calculate the balance based on the sales value and payments received, so you will need to record each refund individually, or you can set the balance to zero once a booking is cancelled, which is much easier to manage. You can also choose whether you want to include local payment in the sale value balance or not. And you can also see the manually sent bookings emails. If you put an email address in here, this is where these bookings will be received.
Booking Edit Functionality and Checklists
Booking Edit Functionality: You can add the final check to your booking if some senior staff have to review the bookings before they go through. And you can also set up a manual itinerary type. You can do that by just switching it on and off here.
A very useful feature could also be the Checklist. So you can add a checklist to your bookings with different lines here, like "call to confirm," "send info," "send the welcome package." And this checklist will be visible within the Workflow tab in your booking.
Voucher Handling
You can furthermore configure how vouchers are handled within TourCMS. So you can just turn off the voucher redemption functionality, you can do irregular voucher redemption, or you can do the POS check-in and the voucher redemption. If you need more info on that, you can find it here in this help article. Here is different information you can or cannot include on the voucher, however you prefer, like the supplier name (so you can show it or not on the voucher booking numbers).
Booking Numbering
You can also define your booking numbers. So, if you want to start with a booking number, like for 2021, you could do it in this manner. So the booking will just count up from 2021. So if you do that every first of the year, you will also know how many bookings you had within this year by just looking at the booking number. Very important, obviously, the number cannot be set lower than an existing booking ID; that wouldn't work. The same applies to the invoice sequence ID.
Flag Notifications
Flag Notification: Here, you can set which flags and notifications will be set for the bookings. Also, please refer to the further information article if you want to know how this works in detail. Some of these settings are also user-specific, and you can define them within the user accounts.
And this is basically how this setup for the general bookings is done in TourCMS.